Facebook Is Uncool

In a recent earnings call, Facebook CFO
David Ebersman was pleased to announce that Facebook "remained close to fully
penetrated among teens in the U.S." Ebersman was replying to an concerned
investor worrying that Facebook was becoming "uncool" and losing traction with
younger users. This comment seems to highlight the popular notion that Facebook
has become next MySpace.

Therefore, it's surprising that many observers of the Internet are calling
Facebook the next big thing for culture, art, and authentic alternative life.
Dis Magazine identified Facebook as "the dominant
platform" for art and artists, and a piece in n+1 noted
that the average Facebook profile has about the same amount of text and literary
value as the average novel.

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A rather bland term has emerged to describe the interesting parts of Facebook:
"Weird Facebook", a subculture within normal Facebook, a loose network of meme
pages, secret groups, and most importantly, personalities and friendships. A
bewildered reporter at the Daily Dot described Weird
Facebook as an "inscrutable world" that "shouldn't exist", where David Lynch and
Yung Lean seem to have "projected their consciousnesses onto social media".

An insider we talked to described "Weird FB" as a community of people who have
"10+ mutual friends in the 'art world'", a place where "long text updates are
welcome." The insider said that she knows someone is an observer or participant
of Weird Facebook if Bunny Rogers is a
mutual friend.

Another individual said that becoming part of Weird Facebook was "a natural
transition from being a heavy reader", and that her Facebook friends were "a
big comfort". A survey of Weird Facebook includes 'art world' people, writers,
4chan and reddit users, people who are obsessed with rare memes, IRL
influencers, social justice 'warriors', and seemingly normal people who love
shitposting on Facebook. Some people on Weird Facebook use their real name,
which is sometimes a Google-able brand, and others have multiple shell accounts,
accounts that are often deleted by Facebook's automated moderation systems.

Why is all this weird art and meme stuff happening on Facebook, specifically?
The Daily Dot noted that "Facebook is not the forum for this kind of shit at
all."

Facebook Was Once Exclusive

In the formative days of Facebook, you could only get a profile if you went to
Harvard, a fact that gave the social network a whiff of exclusivity. Facebook
was full of "real people", not spam accounts, and had a clean, whitespace-heavy
UI. Friendships on Facebook represented real-life relationships, worth some
amount of social capital. These features helped set Facebook apart from its
main competitor, MySpace.

Despite Facebook's aggressive demographic and geographic expansion, the website
has attempted to ensure that Facebook accounts always correspond to real people,
and that Facebook friendships correspond to real friendships. In practice, this
resulted in Facebook deleting the accounts that people made for their pets,
along with the accounts of transgender individuals who change their names.
Facebook also takes measures to prevent people from requesting friendship with
people they don't know from real life.

Why are artists and weirdos talking on Facebook, instead of some cooler,
alternative site on the Internet with less restrictions? Like Ello, for
example? Subcultures have always tried to build their own institutions, often
around custom websites, businesses, or publications. In many ways, founding an
alternative institutions is the Gen X and Millennial dream. So why are the
greatest and weirdest minds of our generation having the conversations that
matter most in the bleak terminal morass that is Facebook?

The Internet Subculture Diaspora

The past year has been rough for Internet subcultures. Alt Lit finally
fragmented due to multiple rape scandals, Net Art continued its downward slide
into the corporate art world, Hipster Runoff quietly died (for real this time),
vaporwave stalled, Gamergate happened, Reddit suffered a series of embarrassing
scandals, and the founder of 4chan threw in the towel.

All of these subcultures are (or were) rooted in specific websites and brands:
popserial.net, dump.fm, hipsterunoff, ello.co, rhizome.org, /b, Macintosh Plus,
Feminist Frequency, Yung Lean. They failed, sometimes due to the "observation
effect", sometimes due to bad behavior by the part of their founders, or
sometimes just to entropy. These subcultures only matter to small, incestuous
groups of people, except when they "fuck up". The Millennial failure to create
scalable alternative institutions has meant that many younger people are in
retreat, along with the weird friends they made elsewhere on the Internet.

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Often, it seems that all that remains of old subcultures like Tumblr,
LiveJournal, or Neopets are the Facebook friendships. These are the online
relationships that people loved enough to bring into the sphere of Facebook, the
realm of real life.

Facebook, Real Life, and "Normies"

For many, Facebook has become the social network where "real life" happens.
It's where people announce their new achievements, relationships, marriages, and
children. But what if you don't have any of these things? What if you don't
have a "real life"?

"I guess I got into 'weird facebook' after I failed out of college and was
living with my parents," said Lucas, the owner of a page dedicated to music
memes. "No one called it [weird facebook] at the time obviously, I had no idea
what I was doing. I added some weird musicians and writers that I was into.
Eventually I added so many of these people that facebook started suggesting more
of them, and I'd get a bunch of requests."

"This was like, four years ago? Now I have hundreds of mutual friends with
people who I've never met, and never will meet. My mom sometimes asks me about
weird things that she sees 'on my facebook'. I guess everything I do shows up
in her newsfeed because she has so few friends."

The Scalability of Weird Facebook

There's a tension between the "normal" usage of Facebook and the alternative
users, who want to use Facebook like they used tumblr or a personal blog.
There's also a tension between the sophisticated, ambitious 'culture world'
users of facebook and those just want to do weird things on Facebook for the
hell of it, because Facebook provides an excellent platform for shitposting.

It's hard to point at any one thing that can represent Weird Facebook. There's
no one page or person that defines weird facebook, and this is part of what
makes weird facebook robust. Weird Facebook is an emergent property of a
certain network of people, not an aesthetic that someone pushed as part of an
agenda. The networked nature of Weird Facebook is what will allow it to scale,
and allow it to survive scandal or changing fashions. Weird Facebooks rests
upon a vivid virtual reality created by millions of man-years of engineering, a
reality that's hard to match anywhere else on the Internet.